I'm trying to localize an italian Puppy leaving as last task scripting localizing.
Now, I had a problem to localize OpenOffice 2.04 which I download from Mark's webspace. I download from debian repository italian language pack and tried to install with Mark's debian installer but it did not give me any result. I had always english openoffice and in Tools - Languages I had just the classical 3 choices but not italian. So, I uncompressed the package and merged the 3 directories (I can recall their name right now) with the openoffice ones installed on my hd and it seems to work. I have a localized italian version of openoffice with a minor issue that I can solve, I mean at each startup of writer, calc and so it ask me always for registration wizard (I cannot see license).

thank you for the tips. Here you can download an alien package of italian pack: http://www2.samatel.com/puppy/packages/

I was not be able to create a dotpup, sorry . I was confused about the name of installation directory of OO 2.04 which is /usr/local/openoffice.org2.0 so I was afraid that dotpup could not work.
Alien package seems to install well for me._________________Bye
Slapshot
EduPup 2.0 at
http://www.pieroni.biz/edupup
http://www.giovelug.org
http://puppylinux.ca/tpp/edupup/

First:
"Unpet" the pet package. That particular package will get installed in your home directory.

Make sure you have enough space on your disk and in your pupsave file. This openoffice package will unpack in the home directory but you still need enough space in your pupsave file to process the unpacking. For example, I had to increase the size of my pupsave from 512 Mg to 768 Mg, for the unpacking to work properly.

As an additional note, my home partition is formated in ext3. I don't know if my suggested solution will work if your partition / disk is a fat 32 or ntfs.

Once un-packed, you will see a new directory named openoffice in your home partition/disk, with two sub-directories named openoffice.org and openoffice.org3.

Second:
Un-deb the language pack. You'll now have a tar.gz package in your download directory. DO NOT UNTAR IT WITH 7-zip or peazip, you'll lose whatever symplinks the package may contain. Click on this tar.gz package, and the usual puppy archiver will open it.

The newly created directory will contain a series of *.deb files. Unpack each one in the same way (clicking on it). All the files will be unpacked in directories named /opt/openoffice.org and /opt/openoffice.org3. Be patient, there's 12 files or so to un-deb!

Note: these deb files will be unpacked automatically if you have one of the newer puppies (v. 4.3, dpup and the like) or if you have installed the deb extension for the older Puppy archivers.

Third: open two ROX-Filers, A) one within /mnt/home/openoffice, B) the other within the /opt sub-directory in your download directory.

Four: copy the directories in B) to the ones in A). Answer yes if any confirmation of overwrite is asked.

Five: the Puppy openoffice pet has an entry for openoffice or soffice in the /usr/bin directory. Check if it's there. If it is, check also in /usr/share/applications if you have openoffice *.desktop files there. If those files are there, you should now have a localized openoffice.

Six: try it! Either by lauching from the menu entry under documents, or by typing

soffice &

in a console.

Other notes:
An openoffice sfs file which uses /opt will work, but in English only. You can drop the localisation package over it, as explained above, but the localisation files will stay in your pupsave file in opt/, they will not incorporate in the original sfs, which is a protected file. This means a bigger pupsave, and an iffy localisation. The best solution is the outside solution: openoffice in your home directory, preferably on an ext3 disk.

If you don't put the localisation files with the exact version number as the main openoffice over the the main openoffice, again, expect an incomplete localisation. For example, the main menu may stay in English but you'll have the main help and the help balloons in your language.

The best is to download an entirely localised linux openoffice package, if you have enough experience unpacking *.deb files. But the half-ready above package and solution will provide the same result.

As an alternative, you could download the Windows localized package, if you have the wine package installed in your puppy. It will work, but then, expect very slow response from openoffice.

If the above sounds like a lot of work ... it is! Unfortunately, there's a trade-off in Puppy: it has lots of nice feature at the system level that make it user-friendly, but localization still has to be done manually (or semi-manually, since some utilities, and more or less partial localisations from MU and esmouguit, etc. do exist).

My explanation of this is that the rate of change of Puppy is so fast that any substantial localisation of it cannot take hold in due time. By the time it takes to make a decent localisation available, another Puppy is out, so... Like re-enacting the myth of Sysyphus!!!

Please don't hesitate to share your opinions, comments, experiences on Puppy localisation in the relevant threads in the forum. We need lots of them: Anglophones speaking the dominant lingua franca of this age, they are not, left to themselves, inherently aware of the need for good localisations, or more generally, of the localisation problem as experienced from outside the English language.

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